by Dina-Perla Portnaar
Regxsa, formerly known as AMLabc, empowers financial institutions in taking responsibility towards society and doing the right thing. The company launches the cloud based solution Alexis to bring back the human factor in the heart of the fight against money laundering, terrorism financing and related financial crimes. Regxsa supports financial institutions to meet local and global regulatory requirements. The company also aims at achieving and exceeding regulatory expectations and doing the right thing for society, through advisory services, training, placement and cloud based AML investigations. The company launched the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) investigation tool Alexis with top software development company Fortech in 2020.
On the one hand, financial institutions realise that they play a key role in society. They need to keep up with the ever changing strategies of criminals, who don’t follow boundaries and adapt their modus operandi based on the circumstances. Unlike financial institutions, criminals are not bound by licenses, investment restrictions, balance sheets, shareholders or regulatory restrictions. In short, financial institutions need to protect society by putting the customer at the core of their operations. On the other hand, society does not have sufficient knowledge of anti money laundering, terrorism financing and financial crimes, unless the lives and safety of individuals are directly affected. Regxsa supports the financial institutions. By doing that, Regxsa also ensures that the needs of society are being met.
Application design defines how investigators will let technology work for them
To save time, energy and money spent on making the regulators satisfied and mostly, to bring back the human factor in the heart of the fight against crimes, Regxsa and Fortech launch Alexis. Not the technology stack, but the application design defines how investigators will let technology work for them. Alexis is built with that philosophy, brings innovation and leverages a lot of technologies which are hard to get within financial institutions. The solution has a scalable infrastructure for a massive volume of data. The financial institutions can choose where they want to store their data. The location of the cloud can be flexible, which means that they worry less about staying compliant with the regulations of their own country versus the different regulations of the other countries.
Flexibility and freedom through map architecture and mind shift
Flexibility and freedom to perform research is supported by the map architecture of the Alexis SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution and by an internal mind shift within financial institutions. A proper strategy design to combat money laundering, terrorism financing and financial crimes focuses on a team that can be flexible, proactive and free to create plans and strategies and a team that can address regulatory expectations. The core layer on the front-end in Alexis remains the same, while investigators are empowered to focus on slicing and dicing the data based on different criteria. Investigators do not just look at rows of data provided to them, but at different aspects as they go time-travel in the system.
They can ensure that the behavior of the investigated party has indeed changed. They are informed whether the investigated party may or may not be showing similar behavior as other known schemes, i.e. they learn from mistakes and can share best practices across the financial industry. Previously, this was not possible for financial institutions. All of this allows financial institutions to protect society and grow their business further. In other words, Alexis presents the exposure to risky areas, after which financial institutions can bypass and expand their business in non-risky areas.
“Previously, there was limited information available on money laundering schemes. There were not a lot of cases on the internet. I started a portal, gathered information such as news, case studies and fines across the world. At the same time, the focus of the company was on consultancy services, for example at Rabobank and ING. For years, the company consulted in patterns and behaviors on how the products and services could be abused for money laundering and what kind of controls could be put in place. Training and awareness was also part of our activities. We have years of on the ground experience across different financial institutions and have seen all the ups and downs. Knowing what is and isn’t possible led to the launch of Alexis, an out of the box solution that works,” says Abhishek Dwivedi, CEO of Regxsa.
“The concept behind Alexis is to enhance the capability of investigators to take decisions. They need to visually process large datasets in raw formats, or trust different software solutions to make decisions for them. Alexis’ innovative approach is to process large datasets efficiently and present them in an interactive multi-layered visual interface. Working agile with Regxsa was critical to capturing the vision and rapidly embedding it in the product. Alexis has a modular design, as we expect building a custom-tailored experience for various investigation teams. The reusable app components will increase the product’s flexibility in the future, enabling a shorter time-to-market for new features development,” says Mihai Soroceanu, Alexis Tech Lead at Fortech.